Lowest Common Denominator Quotes

The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

If you want to reach a large audience, appeal to idiots.

The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.

Simply put, I believe we should not seek the lowest common denominator when it comes to wilderness and saddle a wilderness designation with exceptions, exclusions, and exemptions.

What happens in the Senate is the Republicans sink to the lowest common denominator.

The issues at the core of our national debates are more complicated than can be explained in soundbites and slogans by talking-heads and special guests. The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

If you take a look at education, the kids that get good grades are said to humiliate those who don't. And what, then, do we do? Slow them down. We put obstacles in their way. We do not devise public education systems that are designed to deal with their superior learning ability. We retard it so that they don't learn any more, any faster than the lowest common denominator - and that really is the nub of it. The Democrats' equality and sameness is all going to be defined by the lowest common denominator.

I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

We have to take risks in British television. It has to stop playing to the lowest common denominator and patronising people.

I like art with a sense of humor. I don't have a huge art education to understand everything. I don't think that means that art has to be watered down to the lowest common denominator, though. I don't think you have to go to college to be able appreciate great art, but I like art that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Washington is a city which drives us all to the lowest common denominator.

There was supposedly no point showing 'Nightbreed' to critics because the people who see these movies don't read reviews, in brackets, even if they can read at all! Immediately it was disqualified from serious criticism. Therefore, it had to be sold to the lowest common denominator.

I think Trump uses social media as a way to get to people's lowest common denominator. He uses it to incite fear. He talks about simplistic ideas.

And it's exactly what's wrong with the radio. It's like...anything that tries to appeal to everybody always ends up sounding so cheap.

The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified, lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

We know where the television is - everything has to be a sound bite; everything has to be an image; ideas are okay as long as they don't take more than four or five seconds to explain; candidates and issues are commodities that are sold like cans of soup; entertainment is limited to what a few people believe the lowest common denominator is; and you can't talk back to it.

Email has the virtue - sounds like a bad thing, but it's the virtue of being the lowest common denominator messaging protocol. Everyone can have it. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It's not some particular company's platform.

Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.

This can not be about a race to the bottom.

One thing to argue against Hillary Clinton being harmed by my saying on aging is that when you take Hollywood and television and look at the primary demographic there. Hollywood movies. Most of them are made for guys that still have acne, just reached puberty, you know, under 24. And they don't vote, the lowest common denominator in terms of age demographics.

Most of the time people are aiming so low on television. They're trying to reach that common denominator, especially on network television.

Most of us, however committed we are to our ideals, will find ourselves every now and again reading an attention-grabbing headline from the Daily Mail or some other lowest-common denominator. That's not the same thing as frequenting a site like the white supremacist Stormfront.

Things meant to appeal to the masses usually end up appealing to no one.